en, near Memmingen, which lies about
mid-way between Augsburg and the east end of the Lake of Constance.
The source of our information is the correspondence of one of the
brothers, Nicholas Ellenbog (or Cubitus); 890 letters copied out in
his own hand, and only 80 of these printed. It is not so continuous a
narrative as Butzbach's, but the picture that it gives is rather more
pleasing.

Nicholas' father was Ulrich Ellenbog, a physician of Memmingen, who
graduated as Doctor of Medicine from Pavia in 1459, and became first
Reader in Medicine at Ingolstadt. The letters introduce us to most of
his children. One son, Onofrius, went for a soldier, became attached
to Maximilian's train, and received a knighthood; another, Ulrich,
became M.D. at Siena, but died immediately afterwards; another, John,
became a parish priest. Of the daughters three remained in the world;
one, Elizabeth, married; another, Cunigunde, died of plague caught in
nursing some nuns. The fourth daughter, Barbara, at the age of nine
entered the convent of Heppach, and lived there forty-one years,
rising to be Prioress and then Abbess. We shall hear of her again.

Nicholas Ellenbog, 1480 or 1481-1543, was the third son. After five
years at Heidelberg, 1497-1502, in which he met Wimpfeling and was
fellow-student, though a year senior, to Oecolampadius, he went off to
Cracow, the Polish university, which was then so flourishing as to
attract students from the west. Schurer, for example, the Strasburg
printer, was M.A. of Cracow in 1494; and some idea of the condition of
learning there may be gained from a book-seller's letter to Aldus from
Cracow, December 1505, ordering 100 copies of Constantine Lascaris'
Greek grammar. For some months Ellenbog heard lectures there on
astronomy, which remained a favourite subject with him throughout his
life. Then an impulse came to him to follow his father's footsteps in
medicine, and at the advice of friends he went back across half Europe
to Montpellier, which from its earliest days had been famous for its
medical faculty. In the long vacation of 1502 he spent two months with
a friend in the chateau of a nobleman among the Gascon hills, and on
their return journey they stayed for a fortnight in a house of
Dominican nuns. The sisters were strict in their observances, and gave
a good pattern of the unworldly life, which attracted Ellenbog
strongly. In 1503 he went home for the long vacation to Memmingen. On
the way he was